This invention relates to waste baskets or other containers, combined with insect combating means such as trapping and/or poisoning, preferably also with insect attracting means. In preferred embodiments, the invention relates to waste baskets, and is targeted specifically to bed bugs and/or roaches and/or ants.
For convenience, the invention will be described primarily with reference to “waste baskets” and “bed bugs”, but it should be understood that the invention could be adapted to containers other than waste baskets, and to certain insects other than bed bugs, especially other crawling insects such as roaches, for example.
It should also be understood that “trapping” does not necessarily mean complete eradication. In some applications, the invention may be used simply to detect the presence of bed bugs, by trapping one or more bed bugs. This may then indicate the presence of a larger problem, requiring more aggressive solutions such as steam or chemical treatment.
Populations of insects such as bed bugs have resurged in recent years, particularly throughout parts of North America, Europe, and Australia. The increase of international travel in recent decades has contributed to the resurgence of these insects. There are many aspects of bed bugs that make it difficult to eradicate them once they have established a presence in a location. They are most commonly found in rooms where people sleep, and they generally hide nearest the bed or nearby furniture, baseboards, etc. Their flattened bodies allow them to conceal themselves in cracks and crevices around the room and within furniture. There is a serious need for efficient detection, trapping and monitoring tools to combat these insects.
The invention is intended for use primarily in homes, hotel rooms, offices and other settings where it may be especially desirable to disguise function as a bed bug trap. In a hotel room, for example, the hotel obviously might prefer that a guest not realize that there is a bed bug trap, in case that signals to the guest that there is a bed bug problem in the hotel. Similarly, in a home or office, disguising the trapping function may be desirable for the same reason.
Hotels are some of the most likely places for bed bugs or roaches to proliferate, due to the transient hotel guests, and coming and going of their suitcases and possessions. It is extremely important for anyone with a bed bug or roach problem, but for hotels in particular, to be able to detect the presence of them, and preferably to trap them as well, before the problem spreads from room to room. At the same time, as stated above, it is also extremely important to avoid the stigma of an insect infestation, or even of the possibility of an infestation. It is therefore desirable to have an insect trap which serves another function in parallel, i.e. with no indication that it is in fact an insect trap. It is therefore particularly advantageous to combine the insect trap with a waste basket, because a hotel room guest expects to see a waste basket, and is not likely to detect that the waste basket also acts as an insect trap.
Prior art such as U.S. Pat. No. 1,276,770, JP52-142870, JP 51-109179 and JP 4-127704 disclose garbage cans, which combine a trap at the bottom to passively trap animals like rats and roaches that are attracted by food garbage. Some garbage cans also combine various bait stations for dispensing poisoned bait to kill pests that are attracted to the garbage can, as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 6,470,622, and WO2007108821A.